More rants of a dead man

The super zippy multi core crazy fast microprocessor in your computer spends well over 99% of its lifetime doing absolutely nothing.

On the rare occasion when you can manage it keep it a little busy you might hear the fan in your PC or laptop spin a little faster, but by and large your processor is idle most of the time.

What a waste. Most of the time the computer is waiting for you to read a web page or your email while it sits there and hums and waits for you to click the next button.

The problem though is that when you DO click something, you want it to respond quickly. So you have this incredible amount of processing capacity at your fingertips, so it can dance like crazy for you once every few minutes for a few fractions of a second and sit there useless the rest of the time.

But I have a solution. “What’s the problem?” you’re probably asking yourself…

I have designed a processor that takes all that idle processing capacity and stores it up, and then blasts through it when you want the computer to do something. In this way you can actually buy a lower capacity processor that functions much better than the current top of the line screamer. So it can be had for a lot less money and can be added to, to store more idle capacity for a lot less than the cost of a new processor or new computer.

If your processor fills up its processor capacity cache, you can sell the excess to big company server farms who are always for want of more capacity, or even “push” it over to your iphone or android machine. The market for this cache trade will be astronomical in size as more and more systems come online and intel and amd become less capable of enacting more and more of moore’s law.

You read it here first.

It’s starting to sound to me like the cost of a windows license is cheaper than the cost of a lawyer to figure out if any and all
software you’re going to be writing software for/against/with will conflict with the zillions of linux related licenses.

I never thought of it before, but it sounds like the free software people are shooting themselves in the foot by having so many
different incompatible licenses. Actually I don’t know if they’re incompatible or not, but I’m certainly not going to pay a lawyer to
find out.

Now that’s just a cost-of-business kinda thing. I fully support anybody who wants to write any software and put as many or as few licenses on it having to do with statically building or non distribution or sale, etc… But you gotta figure, the end user (a software development company) is going to take a short soft look at “buy a windows license or figure out what we can and can’t easily use in the free software world” and they’re going to see that the windows license is an easier deal.

I tell ya, I’m a unix guy through and through, but at this point after hearing about all these different licenses, I’d lean towards
going with windows.

Is it just me or does anybody else also think that any publication that’s online only, isn’t as serious as something in print.

I’m sorry but there’s so much free shit and other pay shit on the net, why would I take your piece of shit any more seriously than just a list of links posted on facebook?

What makes it a magazine, and not just a bunch of pages that link to each other on a website?

It just seems lame and pathetic. Not cohesive at all.

If it was ‘an experience’ of some kind other than just linking from one article to another so easily pulled away by an errant ad placed here and there, I might be more inclined, but every magazine on the web is like every other magazine on the web. Just a bunch of free floating content to be found by google.

Which I guess makes the point: A print magazine is physically cohesive. You can’t accidentally look at an ad and end up reading a different magazine. You can’t find an interesting phrase and easily look up the phrase in the search bar and get drawn away by the wikipedia article on the subject. A magazine is a lot more than just a paper collection of articles. It’s a grouped pile of related information that is logically and physically tied together.

That exclusivity of grouping and physical attachment is what makes a magazine attractive over jumping from link to search box to link to search box.

Magazines that go online only do so because they can’t afford to print paper given that most of their readers are giving up paper for randomly flitting about … well, let’s face it… facebook. And it’s a dying art form and get used to it yada yada yada.

But I bet you won’t see the economist or the new york times going online-only until well after my generation is dead.

The other day I wanted to check out the new gnome 3 desktop for linux that everybody has been saying sucks so bad.
So I fired up a 4th vbox vm on my machine and installed it. Asking for another gig of memory for the vm I finally used up all 8gig of ram on my machine, and the most interesting thing happened…
It started using swap. I’ve had this machine for a year or two now I think, and I got 8 gig because I found swap annoying, and now I have proof. The problem is disk is getting bigger and bigger, and programs are getting bigger and bigger and memory is getting bigger and bigger, but the speed at which you can swap memory in to and out of disk hasn’t really changed much, certainly not in line with the memory and disk sizes, so what ended up happening was the machine would just freeze and the disk would spin for 15 seconds or so while a gig or two was swapped in or out of memory.

This made me realize that I think we’ve finally seen the end of swap. There’s no point. Memory is so cheap, you might as well just buy more memory and keep everything in it. Now I realize that using huge memory sucking vms is pretty much the worst case scenario, and there’s probably lots of small things that can be swapped out to disk due to lack of use, but when you start opening firefox (2gig resident at the moment) and chrome (another gig or two resident) you really run into the swap problem the same way, the VM just makes it worse faster.

Anyway, so along that stream, since I’ve decided never to use swap again, SSDs become a lot more interesting because you don’t have to worry about burning them out because of swap… So I found this.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227515

I recently heard a talk about the demise of the internet as a result of the exhaustion of ip addresses with ipv4.

I always figured, ‘aahhhh, what a load of crap, just NAT the shit out of everything.’ But the speaker pointed out you run into the problem of port exhaustion on the internet-facing machine. Okay, point taken, I concede, the NAT forever thing won’t work. Although it certainly could last a long long time if they bothered to organize a little better, but I’ll let that go, we really are running out of addresses.

Still, the sky is far from falling, I have one really simple thought that made all of ipv6 really pointless and a terribly complicated exercise in wasting everybody’s time.

ipv4 has its share of problems, but the biggest one is that we’re running out of addresses, or rather in February, the IANA actually handed out the last batch. That’s it no more.

IPV6 was designed starting 15 years ago or so, and nobody lifted a finger to fix something that wasn’t broken. But in all that time, like c++ and everything else, they had grand plans, and they added features. IPV6 was going to streamline all sorts of byte wasting excessive packet size, it was going to enable ipsec at the ip layer (or something like that I forget the details) and they were going to add this useful feature, and that useful feature and so on and so forth for all 15 years that everybody was ignoring them and not implementing it.

But fast forward to now, and it turns out the only problem we ACTUALLY have to solve is that we’re running out of addresses.

ipv6 offers a 128 bit source and destination address, and the current rollout of ipv6 as it is being adopted is pretty much doing absolutely nothing other than solving the problem of running out of addresses. All that ipsec and all that other grand vision feature stuff is all gone. People are implementing ipv6 because they need more addresses and that’s it.

ipv6 was supposed to be many things to many people, but as it turned out, we only really needed the bigger address space.

Well if you look at the ipv4 header there’s got to be 3-5 bytes of shit that nobody ever uses for anything (like the fragment stuff), that just go to waste and could have been repurposed for an extra byte or two of source and dest addresses. It may not get you 128 bits of address but it would push out the address exhaustion problem a few centuries. It would have taken 1 guy maybe 2 days to hack it into the linux kernel (and you could even swipe a bit from the version to say whether or not this is a new-address-style packet so it could be backward compatible.) Microsoft would wait 2 years, then add support and say they invented it and are responsible for saving the world from the collapse of the internet.

But no. Instead everybody and their mother had to implement ipv6 which does nothing but add address space.

You almost can’t blame all those fucking morons. If they had just set out to solve the problem that needed solving, they could have implemented the hack ipv4 solution YEARS ago and there would never have been a problem, people would have had plenty of time to implement it before we started using the ‘extra’ address space.

But no, they had to design the next great thing which was going to solve all the problems of networking in one fell swoop. And because they’re fucking morons, they’re too dim to see that every other fucking process in the world falls apart the exact same way, and therefore could not have predicted what actually happened that ipv6 would be pared down to its one useful feature.

No, you can’t blame them, because they’re too fucking dumb.

I do most of my programming in java and I use eclipse which just makes everything real easy. I can refactor, flip between source files, look up every instance of something with a few keystrokes and in a matter of seconds.

This past week I had to work on fixing a C program I wrote a few years ago. My dev environment for C programs isn’t quite as snappy as my java environment and I had to do a bunch of things the old school way. A text editor, a compiler that I actually have to invoke rather that being run automatically every time I hit save and so on.

It was a much smaller program than anything I usually work on but because of the environment involved, everything went a lot slower. I had to wait longer between writing something and testing, and between saving and compiling, and between debugging a line and seeing the watch variables get updated. Every little step of the entire process is slower.

And it makes the whole thing take longer as a result, but interestingly, it keeps my attention. While you’re in the thick of programming, getting distracted is the kiss of death, so I have to maintain my concentration for much longer periods of time, which gives me more time to think in the context in which I’m working, and gives
me time to think through some of the things I’m doing so that I do the right thing the first time instead of doing it wrong and then doing it again, but it’s so quick it doesn’t matter.

And the time just whipped right by, and I’m wondering if that’s not where my love of programming went. Killed by the rapid application development environment.

Making programming brainlessly easy (java combined with eclipse) takes the fun out of it. When was the last time I had to worry about a deallocating memory to avoid a memory leak? Years. Have I had a need to make something go so fast that it could only be done in a non-java language? Not in a long long time. 1991 I think. They just keep making hardware faster and faster.

I’m a dying breed I guess.

It has been long known that the NA in nazi stands for network administrator, but it wasn’t until last week that a friend of mine enlightened me to the full meaning of the acronym: Network Administrator Zero Internet.

In other news, having recently learned about the details of how closures are implemented (in javascript anyway) it seems to me that closures isn’t a terribly good word to describe the effect and instead I think the technique should be called “Flying Scope.”

I just had the best idea for an iphone application. Go ahead steal my idea but give me credit, and some money.
A friend of mine just lost his iphone to the washing machine.
First of all, I can’t imagine why they’re not waterproof. They have no moving parts and there’s no externally accessible battery compartment, I can’t imagine why it’s not waterproof.
But anyway. Here’s my idea: an app that uses the motion sensor (and maybe even the camera) to detect when it’s being bounced around (as in a washing machine) and sends you an email saying “Help! I think I’m in the washing machine! Save me!”
If you have any amount of home automation set up, the iphone could power off the washing machine itself and save itself.
Just an idea there.

I went to the ear doctor a year or so ago to get custom made earplugs because those little squishy ones hurt my ears. He asked me what I wanted them for and I said mowing the lawn and motorcycling things like that.
Apparently he doesn’t like motorcycles and thinks anybody who rides one is dumb. He said that to me in not so many words.
At the end of the doctor visit I ask my customary doctor joke “So, I’m going to live?”
“Well, maybe not if you keep riding that bike.”

Well he lost my business.

But today a year later it just occurred to me, because I’m going on my first bike ride this year this weekend, that I actually ride my
bicycle more in a year than I do my motorcycle, definitely time-wise and even mileage-wise.
On my motorcycle I have a full face helmet, lots of leather with kevlar and all sorts of other shielding.
On my bicycle I wear a small piece of styrofoam on the top of my head and spandex.
On my motorcycle I’m going faster, sure, but I’m also going traffic speed, whereas on my bicycle I’m always going slower than traffic speed and as anybody with any driving experience knows it’s safer to do the traffic speed than the speed limit.
IE you want your speed delta to be as close to zero as possible.

So exactly how is riding a motorcycle less safe than bicycling? But noooooo… nobody has a problem if you say you ride a bicycle.

I have to say I was willing to tolerate google apps until today.
Now they’ve proven themselves to be the shittiest thing in the software world and here’s why.

I’m taking notes on personal things and I wanted to edit at work and home so I figured okay google docs.
So I started my doc today, added a bunch of stuff, came back later, added more.
Came back even more later and went to start typing and it said “trying to contact google…”
and it just sat there. AND IT WOULDN’T LET ME EDIT.

Okay, did we all read that correctly? A word processor that doesn’t function unless it can call home.
What a piece of shit. All this cloud stuff is for fuckheads.
This cements the reality that if you want something to work and be usable it’s got to be a fat client running locally.
I’ll take ms word with its 17 layers of recovery upon blowup over that google piece of shit.
Shit Shit Shit there’s just no other word for it.